Thursday, December 17, 2009

Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has died, and it is real hard to honor the latin admonition. For those who do not know Tshabalala Msimang was the South African Minister of Health under Thabo Mbeki, whose denial that AIDS was caused by HIV has lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of her countrymen, with more in the pipeline. Fortunately, the current government has reversed their policy, although too late for the dead, and many of the living.

Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang advocated marshaling vitamin and nutritional forces against the AIDS virus, H.I.V. She maintained that foods like garlic, lemon, African potatoes and beetroot were stauncher defenses than the antiretroviral drugs that had been proved to prolong the lives of H.I.V.-positive patients and to help prevent the passage of the virus from pregnant women to their babies.

Noting that the drugs had side effects, and adopting the claims of so-called AIDS dissidents who deny a connection between H.I.V. and AIDS, she referred to the antiretroviral drugs as poison.

The UN envoy on AIDS, Stephen Lewis, accurately characterized the Mbeki government policy "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" and

more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state

Denial in the face of clear science has murderous consequences. We have seen this with AIDS, we have seen it with tobacco, asbestos, tetra-ethyl lead and more. Observant readers may have noticed another issue beset by politically and industrially based denialism that uses bought and sold, fringe scientific backing. Copenhagen represents a late and probably last chance to avoid this from human made climate change.

37 comments:

John W. Farley
said...

Bravo Bunny!

Yes, some of the skeptics are paid hirelings of the fossil fuel industry. But not all. Consider, for example, journalist Alexander Cockburn. He is not making a dime from his denial of anthropogenic global warming. But in the latest issue of The Nation (print edition Jan. 4, 2009; available online for subscribers only), he believes the stolen emails reveal a global warming conspiracy. Cockburn endorses the paper by Gerlich and Tschauschner (G&T), saying "the Greenhouse effect violates the second law of thermodynamics".

Back in the real world, if there were no greenhouse effect, the surface temperature of the Earth would be lower by about 33C, putting it below the freezing point of water. The errors by G&T were explained by Arthur P. Smith.

MarkeyMouse says: Not so. Misguided Rabett. What you have there is a "diagram" not a picture of HIV. The photos of the cells could be of any cellular material. Certainly not HIV, cos like I said, it has never been isolated, so no-one knows what it looks like.

MMouse:The WHO guideline is that two out of these three signs, AND at least one minor sign, *in the absence of any other cause of immunosuppression such as cancer, cytostatic therapy, prolonged steroid therapy or malnutrition* are to be considered a sign of AIDS. It is NOT to be seen as a diagnosis, for that a positive HIV test is also required.

MarkeyMouse says: Marco, if the HIV has never been isolated, how can any one do a test for it that works? What the HIV tests do test for is the wreckage of ant random retro virus, and of course pretty well every one in Africa shows up as positive on that score.

Re the WHO guideline, I didn't reproduce the whole thing cos of space. But you followed the link. Nothing is hidden.

Why I make this point here, is that what has happened with the CRU in Norwich is not isolated. The originator of the AIDS theory was also fraudulent, and has made a lot of money out of it.

The anti-smoking research industry has made Billions, and now it turns out they have found that the lung Cancer is due to a Genetic trait. People without that trait can smoke all they want and never get cancer.

There are others.

The pattern is the same.

In each research discipline, by PhD level, the candidates must have completely bought in to the current theory, so as not to interupt the flow of research grant money.

Each discipline is regulated in the same way. Exclusion from University Research if you don't follow the Party Grant Line, exclusion from the Literature etc.

Research in Medecine, Education, Criminology etc all have this problem. It is Political Control of Scientific thought, and of the Public.

AIDS/HIV has been heavily studied in the last couple of decades. As a result, we know more about the way in which HIV causes AIDS than we do about the details of most other diseases. AIDS researchers often disagree about other points, but they agree that HIV causes AIDS.

The visitors to the Rabett Run used to include global warming deniers. Now the portfolio has broadened to include HIV/AIDS deniers.

Marky is a slow little guy, and usually only posts one thing at a time which allows others to use him as a useful teaching tool for the lurkers.

Eli thinks we really hit his sweet spot with AIDS/HIV. OTOH there are very few specialist denialists, you almost always get the entire package, if for no other reason that they are spread thin on the ground.

And oh yeah Marky, those TEMs (which you asked for) are part of a publication and the virus was identified.

More pictures:http://www.medgadget.com/archives/img/hhiivv.jpghttp://www.aids-info.ch/bilder/unterricht/bilder_download/koch6_1.jpg

How does it feel, Markymouse, to have associated yourself with a group of people who are DIRECTLY responsible for the death of tens of thousands of people, by convincing them, or others, to withhold treatment?

Eli thinks we really hit his sweet spot with AIDS/HIV. OTOH there are very few specialist denialists, you almost always get the entire package, if for no other reason that they are spread thin on the ground.

Eric Raymond, author of the well-known essay, "Cathedral and the Bazaar", and who's been making a bunch of noise over some of the code stolen from the CRU server, apparently is also an HIV denialist.

Eli said:"Eli thinks we really hit his sweet spot with AIDS/HIV. OTOH there are very few specialist denialists, you almost always get the entire package, if for no other reason that they are spread thin on the ground."

It is a lot easier to be ignorant in many fields than knowledgeable in one.

Jim Eager said:"Markey's divorce from reality has now been demonstrated without a doubt to be total."

Not only is MarkeyMouse divorced from reality, but evidently lost visitation rights.

MarkeyMouse says: Marco, you picture has no provenance, it could be of anything.

Where in your links does it say HIV has been isolated?

The GP120 link doesn't work.

The remaining pictures again don't have any provenance, and could be of anything.

If that's the best you can do, it's pathetic.

And the guilt is all on you.

People have been imprisoned falsely, fed toxic drugs, given living death sentences, and Billions have been wasted on an alleged virus that has never been isolated, and of which no proven picture exists.

You people are living proof that Socialism has excised any rational thought processes from you. It has left you completely unable to analyse information and reach a correct conclusion.

And here you show yourself to be the empty suit that you are. It wasn't a link, it is a Digital Object Identifier, a system used to identify, among other things, peer-reviewed scientific articles. You don't know what that is, do you? I'll give you a hint: those conspiracy-theory web pages that you visit to get your talking points aren't peer-reviewed.

"You people are living proof that Socialism has excised any rational thought processes from you."

Priceless! The person on this blog (and possibly in this hemisphere) who is the most irrational is telling us that we have lost the capacity for rational thought. Riiiight.

And since there has been no talk of economics, how do you know we are socialists? Does your tin-foil hat let you read our thoughts?

Markymouse:We know your ilk. We come with a paper, you reject it, because...well, because it shows what you asked, but you won't accept it. Just look how Duesberg went after the money the Perth Group offered to show HIV existed...and was declined because the Perth Group did not agree. Several non-virologists attacking someone who at least has some knowledge of viruses...sigh.

Oh, and Markymouse: show me a paper that proves the existence of an influenza virus, including a picture of a proven influenza virus, and including full purification of that virus. Compare that paper to several of the papers I linked to regarding HIV.

This is going to be fun: will Markymouse now also deny the existence of the influenza virus?

MarkeyMouse, my reaction was scornful, not hysterical. I heap scorn on you, scorn that you richly deserve. You have been presented with evidence of the existence of the HIV virus, and you refuse to accept it. That is your prerogative, but with that refusal, you identify yourself as unreasonable and irrational. Furthermore, you won't even bother to seek out information that has been provided to you.

That DOI (that you didn't even realize wasn't a hyperlink) linked to a peer-reviewed article from 1998 about isolating inactivated HIV. You just complained that the "link" didn't work. If you don't even know what a DOI is, why should anyone believe anything you say? So, keep on making your ridiculous accusations and insinuations of conspiracy and socialism. It's all you've got: heated words with no factual basis.

MarkeyMouse won't be responding to your challenge, Marco. (I suspect you know that anyway.) He made a demonstrably false claim, you called him on it, and now he's desperately engaged in a vain attempt to save face.

MarkeyMouse says: Marco and Mark, if you want to cite that paper, you pay for it. Quote any part which says HIV has been isolated. Or alternatively that will be an admission that you can't find a single publicly available Paper which demonstartes HIV separation.

Marco, it appears that MarkeyMouse cannot answer your challenge, and of course he will not back down. So, he desperately tries a third tactic: evading the subject and calling names. Everyone sees you for what you are, MarkeyMouse: an empty suit.

science is about asking questions, performing experiments to prove or disprove, not literature and comprehension,read Gallo and Papovic`s paper 1984 announcing discovery and isolation of hiv. If you are so gifted Mark, and inform us.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.